China is getting its exchange rate adjustment whether it likes it or not. While Chinese officials continue to mull the right time to let the renminbi rise, manufacturing workers are voting with their feet — and their picket lines.

Honda has offered its transmission factory workers in China a 24% wage increase to head off a crippling strike. Foxconn, the Taiwanese contract manufacturer for Apple and Dell, has announced wage increases of as much as 70%. Shenzhen, to head off trouble, has announced a 16% increase in the minimum wage. Beijing’s municipal authorities have pre-emptively boosted the city’s minimum wage by 20%.

The result will be to raise the prices of China’s exports and fuel demand for imports. The effect will be much the same as a currency appreciation.

China should count these wage increases as a measure of its success. Higher incomes are an entirely normal corollary of economic growth.

The only difference in China is that the adjustment has been suppressed, so it is now coming abruptly. It would have been better had Chinese officials encouraged more gradual adjustment earlier, and if adjustment had come through currency appreciation, which would have enhanced workers’ command over imports, rather than inflation, which will make no one happy. But that is water under the bridge.

With exports of manufactures becoming more expensive, China will have to grow by producing something else. It will have to move away from a strategy in which manufactures are the engine of growth towards the model of a more mature economy, in which employment is increasingly concentrated in the services sector.

China will never rival India as an exporter of high-tech and business services, because it lacks that country’s large population of native English speakers. But it has ample scope for expanding the supply of personal and business services for a desperately underserved and increasingly prosperous domestic market. This is a point that Morgan Stanley’s chief economist Stephen Roach makes in his new book, The Next Asia.

The good news, as Roach observes, is that the services sector places less burden on natural resources and creates more employment than manufacturing. The former is good news for China’s carbon footprint, the latter for its social stability.

But the bad news is that the transition now being asked of China — to shift towards services without experiencing a significant decline in economy-wide productivity growth — is unprecedented in Asia. Every high-growth, manufacturing-intensive Asian economy that has attempted this has suffered a massive slowdown.

The problem is more than just the tendency of productivity to grow more slowly in services than manufacturing. Service sector productivity growth in formerly manufacturing-heavy Asian economies has been dismal by international standards.

In both Korea and Japan, to cite two key examples, the problem is not simply that productivity in services has grown barely a quarter as fast as it has in manufacturing for a decade. It is that service sector productivity growth has run at barely half the rate of the US.

Why is this? In countries that have traditionally emphasized manufacturing, the underdeveloped services sector is dominated by small enterprises—mom-and-pop stores. These lack the scale to be efficient, the ability to exploit modern information technology, and the capacity to undertake research and development (R&D). In Korea, less than 10% of economy-wide R&D has been directed at the services sector in the last decade. This stands in sharp contrast to the US, where half of all R&D is associated with services. Enough said.

In both Korea and Japan, large firms’ entry into the services sector is impeded by restrictive regulation, for which small producers are an influential lobby. Regulation prevents wholesalers from branching downstream into retailing and vice versa. Foreign firms that are carriers of innovative organizational knowledge and technology are barred from coming in. Accountants, architects, attorneys and engineers all then jump on the bandwagon, using restrictive licensing requirements to limit supply, competition and foreign entry.

One can well imagine Chinese shopkeepers, butchers and healthcare workers following this example. The results would be devastating. Where value-added in Chinese manufacturing has been growing by 8% a year, service sector productivity is unlikely to exceed 1% if China is unlucky or unwise enough to follow the example of Korea and Japan.

Employing workers in sectors where their productivity is stagnant would not be a recipe for social stability. China needs to avoid the pattern by which past neglect of the services sector creates a class of incumbents who use political means to maintain their position. Perhaps China will succeed in avoiding this fate. Here at least may be one not-so-grim advantage to not being a democracy.

Well, Anthony look at the value of RMB today. I’m sure it was a good buy if you did it when you wrote the comment above. Good read. As for what will happen, China is about to hit the wall sometime soon, the progress is just too fast atm. Most of the people are not benefiting and will put their foot down at some point.

China becoming a service economy would give the opportunity to another third world nation to take its place as the manufacturing hub of the world. India is already a service economy, so Phillipines or Indonesia stand in strong positions to take up China’s current position.

Until about the end of the 20th century conventional wisdom refused to believe that China could rise to dominate the world economy along with the fall of the American economy had any significant probabilities.

Yet here we are in 2010 faced with the reality that our politicians and intellectuals failed completely to accept and deal with challenges that enabled the entire world economy to change beyond our control as arrogance, indolence and ignorance dominated the cultural values of all our institutions.

We appear to have watched and done nothing while the legacy of the Greatest Generation was destroyed by our institutional leaders.

Don’t we have any leaders in 2010 who really care enough to cooperate and make the right things happen in time to avoid the calamities of our economic, environmental, political and social systems?